friendship was cemented one dramatic evening when I emptied at least three pints’ worth of the sickly substance out of my stomach, through her window, and down the side of her otherwise pristine house. Kate was like me: loud, brash and confident, with a similar gothy look and a penchant for squashing her tits into the nearest eager-looking guy. I told her that I fancied Andy and she confessed to a similar infatuation with Si.
It was short for Simon, but Simon was not a name that fitted this guy at all. Skinny, troublingly pale, Si looked like he’d been raised in a cupboard with no light, oxygen or fun. His dark hair and bright blue eyes would probably have served him well in the Twilight generation, but when I was a teenager that only drew odd stares in the street and the occasional ministrations of an equally pale gothic girl.
Kate was just one of those gothic girls.
Si’s house was immaculate, a shrine to minimalism and money. No one we knew had white carpets or a glass coffee table, because most of our friends’ parents recognised that there is a direct correlation between how much something costs and how likely it is that your children will destroy it.
So: shoes off, sober faces on, Si, Kate, Andy and I tiptoed into the lounge. Beers were placed carefully on coasters on the coffee table as he did a quick tour to establish that his parents were not only out but, having taken their overnight suitcase, likely to remain so until we’d cleaned up the remnants of our intimate party the next morning.
Formalities thus observed, we settled into the leather sofas and began to earnestly and conspicuously not talk about sex.
As adults, if a threesome is on the cards, I like to think that we’d be mature enough to be able to discuss it beforehand—not only to establish what people don’t like, but ideally to ascertain what they do. After all, if you’ve never spoken to someone about sex, you have very little idea what will send them into violent fits of ecstasy.
But sadly this kind of communication frequently stumps even the most liberal of adults. When trying to start a threesome, my adult self has been disappointed to find that the scenario hasn’t changed much since I was a teenager:
Step 1: Someone mentions something slightly sexy, as a prelude to some discussion of sex in a general sense: ‘You know that so-and-so and such-and-such are fucking? I’d never have thought it. She does have a lovely arse, though. I’m jealous.’
Step 2: Obligatory awkward silence.
Step 3: Eventually someone leaps on the comment and tries to expand the discussion to include more specific tales or boasts: ‘I fucked her once. It was amazing.’
Step 4: Repeat Step 2.
Step 5: The bravest of you will endeavour to bring the sexy chat closer to home, by complimenting someone who is actually in the room: ‘You know, Trina, you’ve got a lovely arse as well.’
Step 6: The complimentee accepts the compliment, and raises the game by introducing a practical element: ‘Thanks. Would you like to give it a bit of a squeeze?’
Step 7: If you’re lucky, others will join in with compliments and playful flirting. But here’s the crucial bit: in order to make that gargantuan leap from flirting to fucking, one of you has to be brave enough to voice the make-or-break suggestion. ‘Shall we move into the bedroom?’ or ‘How about you lick my nipples?’ or ‘Why don’t you get your dick out and let me suck it?’ have all worked for me in the past. But it takes a hell of a lot of courage to make those suggestions, so if you’re the one that wants the threesome, that courage has to come from you.
With Andy, Kate and Si, it was inevitably my courage that won out. The general chatter had been about one of our friends who had recently come out. Kate moved neatly on to how hot it was watching two guys get off with each other, then told Si how hot he looked on that particular evening. Eventually I took the bull by the horns and asked Andy and Si to kiss.
They did not kiss.
Disappointing, but understandable: straight gentlemen are less inclined to kiss each other to turn me on than my girlfriends are to kiss me for similar reasons. It’s possible, of course, that I’ve just met fewer bi-curious men than women. But, more realistically, I suspect the reason guys are nervous about tongue-fucking each other in front of me is because society still has a childish, disgusted squeamishness about gay guys. Lesbians are, of course, fine. Two pairs of tits rubbing together or a pair of ladies connected at the face is something to be pored over, admired, filmed in black and white and used to sell perfume. But hot, stubbly man kisses are far less common. This is a shame, because two guys kissing is beautiful. I’d like to see more of it—hurried goodbye snogs at airports, deep, lusty snogs in bars, and nervous, dribbly snogs at school discos. Sadly I suspect we’re a few years off this yet, because although two women kissing might raise an eyebrow or an erection, two guys pulling each other with testosterone-fuelled enthusiasm still has people either apoplectic with bigoted rage or pursing their lips disapprovingly and whispering: ‘Euggh. Bumming.’
But I digress. There are certainly far more important things for the gay rights movement to do than hear about my desire for more snogging. The upshot of society’s hatred for the thing I find most beautiful is that in order to persuade the boys to kiss—unnatural, sick, dirty boylust—I had to first agree to have sex with Kate—hooray! Lesbians!
So I did.
Kate, sitting next to me on the sofa, smelt intriguingly and disturbingly feminine. She was so like me that I was surprised when her neck smelt different. We started with a kiss—a deep, long, slow kiss to give the boys time to shift position and get the best view. Si on the adjacent sofa, leaning forward to get as close as possible without spoiling the magic, and Andy on the armchair opposite, getting comfortable like he was in a particularly dirty cinema.
Kate sighed a little as I pulled off her top. I planted a series of kisses from her jawline right down her neck and across her collarbone, ending just where her bra started. It was ill fitting, with her tits spilling slightly over the edge, and, as I unhooked it, I remember feeling a shivery sense of dread, not because I didn’t want to fuck her, but because I didn’t know how. Although all guys are different, I at least knew the basic things I could do to make them happy, and to eventually make them come. But beautiful and full though they were, I had no idea what to do with Kate’s tits whatsoever.
I needn’t have worried. A bit of hesitant kissing showed me that I was at least on the right track, as her nipples stood out stiff and dark against her pale skin. I put one in my mouth, and pressed my face hard into her, enjoying the feeling of softness around my mouth. I slid off the sofa and onto the floor, kneeling in front of her to give me easier access to the parts I felt I should touch. I bit her gently, then continued my way down her body, kissing the underside of her breasts, then running my hands down her hips, and below, to lift the hem of her skirt.
It was summer—there were no tights to worry about, just a dark, lacy pair of knickers. I put my face between her legs and breathed in the smell of her—tangy, rich, less sweet than my own smell. I’m not sure why I was surprised, but I was. I’d expected that she and I would be almost identical, and was taken aback by the differences between us: her skin was softer, her tits were larger and squashed much more easily beneath my fingers. I was so desperate to find similarities that when I put my face in her cunt and made the first tentative licks, I expected to feel a corresponding surge of pleasure on my own clit.
The boys looked on with growing delight as we messed around. I don’t want to say ‘fucked’; it was far less competent than that. I licked at her while she ran her fingers through my hair, sighing either with pleasure or—more likely—frustration that I was doing things so horribly wrong.
After a while, I figured we should get our end of the bargain, and see what the boys could do. I stood up and walked over to Andy, almost frozen to his chair in disbelief. I sat down on his lap, and kissed him, rubbing my salty, Kate-flavoured tongue up against his own.
I could feel how hard he was through his jeans, and I squirmed up against him. Part of me still wanted to watch him kiss Si, to see the two of them nervously lapping at each other like I’d lapped at Kate. But things had gone past that